My name is Kenneth Fisher and I am Senior DBA for a large (multi-national) insurance company. I have been working with databases for over 20 years starting with Clarion and Foxpro. I’ve been working with SQL Server for 12 years but have only really started “studying” the subject for the last 3. I don’t have any real "specialities" but I enjoy trouble shooting and teaching. Thus far I’ve earned by MCITP Database Administrator 2008, MCTS Database Administrator 2005, and MCTS Database Developer 2008. I’m currently studying for my MCITP Database Developer 2008 and should start in on the 2012 exams next year. My blog is at www.sqlstudies.com.

If you ask a senior DBA what are the top 5 most important commands in T-SQL you’ll probably see DBCC CHECKDB in most if not all of those lists. Unfortunately, the output can be long, overwhelming and a more than a bit difficult to read. So here are a few… Read more

I while back as part of a T-SQL Tuesday post I created HAL0001, then later HAL0002 with a long-term goal of building up a database version of HAL9000. Well, at the rate I’m going I may have to pass this on to my kids (or even grandkids). But in… Read more

Sometimes loading new data or even changes into a table just isn’t going to work. You need a complete reload. A summary table of data from the previous month, for example. It just doesn’t make sense to do an update. You delete/truncate and you re-load. Unfortunately, this leaves the table… Read more

SQL Server stores a create date and a change date for each object in the sys.objects system view.

Unfortunately while tables, views and even constraints are objects, indexes are not. Or at least they aren’t stored in the sys.objects system view. And the sys.indexes system view doesn’t have any dates… Read more

First I guess we had best start with definitions right? The permission Administer Bulk Operations and the role bulkadmin are required (one or the other) to perform bulk imports. Nothing more, nothing less. There is a really nice comparison of the two here.

Well, it’s that time of the month again. It’s T-SQL Tuesday yet again, and this time round it’s Andy Yun (b/t) hosting with a subject of Growing New Speakers. Well, I’ll admit I’m a fairly new speaker myself. In fact, I’ve spoken a grand total… Read more

I saw something like this the other day. My first thought was “Hu, never seen that before.” My second thought was “Wow, that’s really cool. I wonder what a hypothetical index is?” A quick search later and I discovered that the DTA (database tuning adviser) uses them to test out… Read more